Tsering Yangzom Lama is a Tibetan Canadian novelist, essayist, short story writer, playwright, and poet whose work moves across Nepal, Canada, the United States, and the longer histories of Tibetan exile. Born in a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal in 1984to parents who had fled Tibet, and later immigrating to Canada at the age of eleven, she writes from within intertwined worlds of displacement, language, memory, and cultural survival. Her fiction and nonfiction are especially concerned with ordinary Tibetan lives, intergenerational trauma, women’s knowledge, statelessness, ritual, and the afterlives of political catastrophe. Lama belongs to an important group of contemporary writers whose work has expanded the imaginative and ethical scope of Canadian literature by bringing refugee histories, diasporic Tibetan experience, and questions of linguistic and cultural survival into sharper literary focus.

Lama’s family roots go back to nomadic grandparents from Ngari in western Tibet. She spent her childhood in Nepal before immigrating to Canada at the age of eleven, first arriving in Vancouver. This early life across borders and refugee histories became central to her literary consciousness. She later completed a BA in creative writing and international relations at the University of British Columbia and an MFA at Columbia University. The movement from refugee camp life to higher literary education in Canada and the United States forms an important arc in her development as a writer, but it did not sever her from the histories and communities that shaped her. Rather, her writing repeatedly returns to the textures of Tibetan life in exile and to the difficulty of carrying history across migration, language, and generation.

While growing up in Nepal, Lama lived within several languages at once. She used English at school, Tibetan at home, Nepali on the streets, and Hindi through Bollywood films. This multilingual environment was not incidental. It formed part of the everyday structure of survival. In an interview with Chemi Lhamo, Lama remarks, “For Tibetans, language is a really potent site of struggle and survival.” That understanding of language as struggle, continuity, and vulnerability is central to her work. Even though books were scarce and financial resources limited in Nepal, she did gain some access to British and American literature, and these readings helped kindle her desire to become a writer. The significance of that early access lies not simply in literary aspiration, but in the way reading offered an imaginative route outward while also deepening her sense of the fragile relation between literature and belonging.

Her first novel, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies (2022), emerged over a long period of roughly twelve years and underwent significant transformation in the course of its making. The project began as the idea for a comic novel centred on the Tibetan community in Toronto, especially the Tibetan enclave of Little Tibet in Parkdale, where Lama herself had once lived. At that stage, the work was meant to capture the humour, mannerisms, provincial attitudes, and everyday social life of the Tibetan diaspora. Over time, however, and especially through her studies at Columbia and her efforts to think more deeply about community, exile, and displacement, the project changed into a work of literary fiction of greater historical and emotional depth. In order to approach the realities of refugee experience more fully, Lama undertook a trekking trip along the Tibet-Nepal border so that she could move through the landscape and imagine more concretely the difficult routes by which refugees travelled from Tibet into Nepal. She also carried out research in Tibetan art, history, and metaphysics, conducted interviews with scholars, and listened to archival narratives. The novel’s final form thus rests not only on imagination but on extensive historical, cultural, and embodied research.

Lama writes about culture and what can be continued from culture.  So she uses Tibetan traditions, ritual knowledge, and figures often neglected in more public or institutional narratives. One example is her treatment of oracles in Tibetan communities. In We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, the character Ama is an oracle. Lama writes, “Some in our village called it an affliction. They said there was a crack in her mind that left her open to spirits who would consume her. But Ama insisted it was a blessing to lend her body to the gods and allow them to speak through her. In time, everyone would listen, and the words of an otherwise ordinary woman would lead us through the coming troubles.”  In Lama’s fictional world, the oracle is not an exotic ornament but a social and historical force. Oracles guide individuals and entire communities through crisis, uncertainty, illness, and upheaval.

This attention to women oracles also has a lived and historical basis. In the refugee camp in Nepal where Lama’s parents lived, there were three oracles, and these were, in practice, women leaders within the community. Lama returns to such women in the novel not merely as figures of belief, but as narrative and historical anchors. In conversation with the poet and writer Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, she explains that she wanted to focus on the lives of ordinary Tibetans in remote places and therefore shifted attention away from the more famous male oracles institutionally linked to monasteries. The women oracles, by contrast, were pillars of everyday community life. They offered premonition, healing, counsel, and mediation. They guided not only persons but communal history itself through periods of fracture and danger. Through this move, Lama restores women’s spiritual and social authority to the centre of literary representation.

We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies traces the life of a Tibetan family across multiple generations and locations and examines what happens when trauma, obligation, migration, and silence reshape kinship. At the centre of the novel is Dolma, a second-generation Tibetan woman raised in the Pokhara Tibetan Refugee Camp by her mother, Lhamo, and her aunt, Tenkyi. The narrative moves between the sisters’ childhood in Tibet, their dangerous crossing of the Himalayas, their connection to Samphel, Lhamo’s sweetheart, their later lives in Kathmandu, and Dolma’s own adulthood. In this layered structure, the novel explores both movement and interruption: movement across borders, camps, cities, and generations, and interruption in the forms of separation, emotional suppression, and broken transmission. The young sisters begin as vivid, outspoken, and loving children, but the ordeals they endure gradually strip away or distort those qualities.

Distance shapes the novel at nearly every level. Characters are repeatedly separated by geography, history, migration, and unspoken memory. They pursue dreams that lead them into their own disappointments and compromised futures. Tenkyi, Lhamo, and Samphel, despite their separate suffering, all come to invest hope in Dolma and in the possibility that she might live a life less burdened by pain. Yet the very love that sustains them is hindered by their inability to speak openly about what has happened to them. Their traumas remain partly sealed, and those sealed experiences become part of what Dolma inherits. As Dolma tries to care for and understand the people around her, she meets barriers formed by their emotional reticence and by the larger history they carry but cannot fully narrate. The novel thus takes up ancestral knowledge, the repression of traumatic memory, and the transmission of grief across generations. It is not only a refugee novel or a family novel, but a sustained meditation on how history survives in bodies, silences, duties, and failed acts of care.

The novel’s title itself suggests embodiment, land, exile, and the relation between movement and memory. To “measure the earth” with one’s body evokes travel, hardship, migration, and emplacement, but also a way of knowing the world through endurance and lived experience rather than through abstract cartography. Lama’s narrative remains attentive to a Tibetan family’s attachment to homeland even as that homeland remains inaccessible. The novel portrays not only displacement but the long labour of trying to reconcile with a history that has not ended and with a homeland from which the family remains cast out. In doing so, it offers a literary account of Tibetan identity that refuses simplification and foregrounds the emotional, historical, and metaphysical costs of exile.

Lama’s literary work extends well beyond the novel and includes essays, short stories, plays, and poems. In “Ritual,” Lama reflects on a photograph of her grandfather, Popo Datsing, taken during a birthday celebration. The photograph becomes an entry into family history and into the Tibetan refugee settlement in Pokhara where her family lived. The essay also turns on memory of learning about her grandfather’s death a decade earlier and on the difference between public and private relations to death. Lama contrasts the relative invisibility of death in the contemporary West with the more visible and communal experience of death in Nepal. This contrast allows her to think about ritual, mourning, visibility, and the social shape of grief. The essay is powerful because it moves from a family photograph toward larger questions of how cultures hold the dead, how memory is staged, and how loss becomes socially legible or hidden.

Before publishing her novel, Lama had already built a notable body of short fiction. Her story “Light,” first published in Nepal in La.Lit magazine in 2013, was later included in the 2018 anthology Old Demons, New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet.  Another piece, “The Greatest Tibetan Ever Born,” appeared in House of Snow in 2017 . Other short fiction includes “The Central Zoo” (2011) in Grain Magazine, “The Riot and a Girl” (2008) in The Malahat Review, and “Things We Ask For” (2007) in Dolma Magazine . This body of short fiction matters because it shows that Lama’s novel emerged from a longer engagement with prose fiction, experimentation, and publication across different literary venues in North America and South Asia.

Her literary practice also includes theatre. In 2006, her play To Undo a Wrong was included in the Brave New Play Rites antholog y published by Anvil Press. She also staged Monkey Temple (2006) at the BC Buds Festival in Vancouver,  and To Undo a Wrong was part of the Brave New Play Rites Festival at the University of British Columbia  in 2006. These works indicate that her interest in storytelling is not confined to the novel and that performance, dialogue, and dramatic staging also form part of her literary background. The theatrical work is especially important when read alongside her fiction, because it suggests a sustained concern with voice, embodiment, and communal witnessing. Lama has published poetry as well. Poems such as “No One Loves the Way I Do,” “One Morning as a Girl,” and “Streetfood” appeared in Dolma Magazine (2006) .

The novel received major recognition soon after publication. In 2023, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies won the Banff Mountain Book Award. It was also shortlisted for the 2023 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, the 2023 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the 2023 Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes. It was longlisted for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. In 2022, it was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and longlisted for both the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Toronto Book Awards. These recognitions place the novel within major Canadian and international literary circuits and indicate the seriousness with which it was received by critics, juries, and institutions. The range of these honours also suggests that the novel was read not only as a “diaspora novel” or “refugee novel,” but as a major work of contemporary fiction.

Lama’s broader literary standing is reflected in the grants, residencies, and fellowships she has received. She has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her residencies include the Jan Michalski Foundation, Loghaven Artist Residency, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay AiR, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Lillian E. Smith Center, Art Omi, Catwalk Institute, Wildacres , and PLAYA Summerlake . She was also selected as a 2018 Tin House Novel Scholar. Such institutional recognition is important not merely as a list of honours, but because it marks the sustained support and critical interest that have accompanied her work as it has developed. Lama is also a co-founder of the blog Lhakar Diaries , focused on Tibetan communities, further indicating her role in creating platforms for Tibetan thought, culture, and public expression.

Tsering Yangzom Lama’s significance in Canadian literature is considerable. She brings Tibetan refugee histories into contemporary Canadian fiction in a way that resists reducing exile to abstraction or geopolitics alone. Instead, she writes through intimate family relations, women’s authority, multilingual life, silence, ritual, and inherited trauma. Her work expands the range of what Canadian literature can hold by centring statelessness, refugee memory, and Tibetan diasporic experience within its field. She is part of a vital body of writers whose work has been reshaping Canadian Literature   by insisting that Canadian literary space must also make room for histories formed elsewhere but lived and written here. Writers such as Lama deserve sustained attention not simply because they are “diverse” additions to a national tradition, but because they alter that tradition’s scope, its moral questions, and its understanding of belonging. In this sense, Lama stands as a major contemporary voice in both Tibetan diasporic writing and Canadian literature.

References

Chau, David. “The Realities of Exile for Ordinary Tibetans Ground Tsering Yangzom Lama’s Debut Novel.” Quill & Quire, 18 May 2022, https://quillandquire.com/authors/the-realities-of-exile-for-ordinary-tibetans-ground-tsering-yangzom-lamas-debut-novel/.

Jeffrey, Emma. “Tsering Yangzom Lama Examines the Humanity of Tibetans at the 2022 Vancouver Writers Fest.” Stir, 12 Oct. 2022, https://www.createastir.ca/articles/vancouver-writers-fest-tsering-yangzom-lama.

Lama, Tsering Yangzom. “Light.” Old Demons, New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet, OR Books, 2018.

Lama, Tsering Yangzom. Monkey Temple. BC Buds Festival, Firehall Arts Centre, 2006.

Lama, Tsering Yangzom. “No One Loves the Way I Do,” “One Morning as a Girl,” and “Streetfood.”  Dolma Magazine, 2006.

Lama, Tsering Yangzom. “The Central Zoo.” Grain Magazine, 2011.

Lama, Tsering Yangzom. “The Greatest Tibetan Ever Born.” Himal Southasian, 2011.

Lama, Tsering Yangzom. “The Greatest Tibetan Ever Born.” House of Snow, Head of Zeus, 2017.

Lama, Tsering Yangzom. “The Riot and a Girl.” The Malahat Review, 2008.

Lama, Tsering Yangzom. “Things We Ask For.” Dolma Magazine, 2007.

Lama, Tsering Yangzom. “To Undo a Wrong.” Brave New Play Rites Anthology, Anvil Press, 2006.

Lama, Tsering Yangzom. We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies: A Novel. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

Lama, Tsering Yangzom, and Sering Wangmo Dhompa. “First Fiction 2022.” Poets & Writers Magazine, July–Aug. 2022, https://www.pw.org/content/first_fiction_2022?article_page=2.

Lhamo, Chemi. “Tibetan Author Tsering Yangzom Lama Opens up about Immigrating to Canada.” The Globe and Mail, 13 July 2022, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-tsering-yangzom-lama-book/.

Monaghan, Pema. “We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama – Book Review.” High Peaks Pure Earth, 4 Aug. 2022, https://highpeakspureearth.com/we-measure-the-earth-with-our-bodies-by-tsering-yangzom-lama-book-review-by-pema-monaghan/.

Wigston, Nancy. “A Tibetan Refugee’s Life in Toronto: Tsering Yangzom Lama’s Debut Novel a ‘Strange and Compelling’ Tale.” Toronto Star, 25 May 2022, https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/a-tibetan-refugee-s-life-in-toronto-tsering-yangzom-lama-s-debut-novel-a-strange/article_2a5f40d2-bda6-541c-a620-17fb5a9d9e59.html.